PARTISAN REVIEW
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ventured as into a strange land. Civilized man, which is to say, the
literate European of the 1840's felt fin>t dismay at
his
alienation in
the cities he had built, then excitement.
If
he was not at home in
the urban landscape, he could visit there like a traveller, a tourist.
Romantic exoticism seeks to escape the tedium and alienation
of bourgeois life by flight in four directions: Back, Out, In and
Down: backward in time like Sir Walter Scott; outward in space like
Robert Louis Stevenson; inward toward the murky depths of the
unconscious like Rimbaud, or down the social scale like Sue and, after
him,
the so-called "Naturalists."
(It
is interesting that Zola wrote one
of the last "mysteries,"
The Mysteries of Marseille.)
All forms of
Romantic Exoticism are kinds of vicarious tourism-the downward
variety vicarious "slumming."
The popular novels of the 1840's are, then, like Cooper's exotic
novels, expressions of a kind of armchair tourism. And their exoticism
had been made possible, even necessary, as a wider and wider gap
had opened between the ordinary city-dweller and, on the one hand,
the Very Rich, on the other, the denizens of the urban underworld,
who came, finally, to seem as remote and romantic as the savages
of the American West: the real Apacheg---,as, in fact, the inhabitants
of the Underworld of Paris actually were called ...
Eugene Sue was aware of how much he owed to Cooper in his
mythologizing of the urban wilderness; and it
is
instructive to read
his own words on the subject:
Everybody has read the admirable pages in which Cooper, the Amer–
ican Walter Scott,
has traced
the fierce customs of the savages; the
picturesque and poetic language, the thousand ruses with the aid
of which they kill or pursue their enemies.
We are going to
try
to put before the eyes of our reader some epi–
sodes from the life of other barbarians, also outside of civilization,
barbarians different from the savage tribes so well depicted by
Cooper.
Only the barbarians of whom we are speaking are in our very
midst.
We can brush against them if we adventure into the hideouts
in
which they live, where they gather to plot murder, theft;
to
share
the spoils of their victims.
These men have customs of their own, women of their own, a lan–
guage of their own-a mysterious language full of dark images and
of bloody and disgusting metaphors.
